Babbling about books and plants.

Someone’s Not Happy

I’m pretty certain the Cyperus papyrus has just been getting too little light. It’s also possible it dried out too much, but in my experience, it’s not as fussy about that as C. alternifolius. It looked a lot like this when I kept it in my north-facing room at my mother’s place, and the weak new growth is also a dead giveaway.

I could really kick myself about that – I moved it away from the bedroom window when I thought I’d get a kitten*, and put it in the living room, out of direct sun. And it was looking so great!

The Cissus antarctica, on the other hand, is just being unreasonable. It’s never done great, but at least OK, until a couple of months ago. I could kind of understand it – it’s in a hard to reach place (on top of my wardrobe, and I have to balance on the footboard of my bed to reach it when I water it), so I didn’t water it often, and I think Vitaceae in general don’t appreciate drying out. But, the more I’ve tried not to let it dry out completely, to water a little bit at a time, the more leaves dried out, and now the branches are dying back, too. Like I said, unreasonable. I chopped off the still-green bits now and stuck them in a bottle of water… maybe they’ll root, maybe they won’t. I don’t much care either way.

The Cyperus will also be cut back, as soon as I have time, and then I’ll cut the rhizome in a couple of places to encourage it to branch – if it just continues to grow and send up new stalks at the ends, I’ll get a plant with a huge “bald” patch in the middle – and put it back on the bedroom window. As long as the Hippeastrums are dormant, I should have space there. I only hope it won’t get too cold. (I never turn on the heating in the bedroom.)

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* I decided against it, it just wouldn’t be fair to a cat… it wouldn’t be allowed into the living room while I’m not home, because of all the plants, and I’m gone at least ten hours every day, frequently more. And then I come home too tired to want to deal with feeding, litter boxes, playing…

And yet, I miss having a cat. I keep thinking I see a cat out of the corner of my eye, and recently I dreamed I had got two ginger toms and was wondering what to name them. If they’d been the same age, I’d have called them Fred and George, after the Weasley twins, but they weren’t, which in my dream was a big problem.